The Macnamara Blog

By the end of 2019, cyber-attacks and technology-enabled scams against small businesses were soaring off the scale.

Why?

The answer is sadly straightforward: the attacks are working. That is, they’re delivering lucrative returns on investments.

In our post on how to spot a fake email, we covered some easy ways to identify the spams, scams and spoofs that inevitably land in your inbox.

But it’s not easy to write one post covering everything. And it’s not uncommon for us to receive a few reports a day from our clients of scamming: there’s a lot of it out there, much of it increasingly hard to identify.

That’s why we’re going to break it down further today and take you through the anatomy of a scam email.

As we move increasingly towards online services, securing your account is more important than ever.

While computer viruses still exist, they’re no longer the route of choice for hackers to get control of your data. Instead, the prevalence of online services means that the bad guys are targeting your cloud services, such as your email and file storage.

At first glance the answer is obvious. No, of course we should never share our passwords, why would we? 

I agree and yet, here’s an oddity: we often encounter small companies where password sharing is common. It may not be obvious at first but with a little digging the practice turns out to be the norm. 

In fact, anecdotally, I would say offices in which some degree of password sharing goes on are more common than those that absolutely ban it.